Microscopic clinical examination of conventional histological stained tissue sections can be used to evaluate tissue structures and morphological patterns of diagnostic significance. Skilled physicians can view such histological stained tissue sections for diagnosis, and to design and evaluate treatments. The contrast of structures provided by such images using classical stains is familiar, and permits the physician to devote her efforts to interpreting anatomical and morphological tissue section features and anomalies, and not on trying to translate how the staining procedure reveals features relevant to her medical training and experience.
Additional tissue imaging techniques are being developed that promise to enhance the correlative diagnostic information obtainable by the physician on valuable biopsy material and archived tissue specimens. For example, fluorescence microscopy can be used for detection of specialized molecular markers, but fluorescence based images typically lack the familiar structural and anatomical context information found in tissue stained with hematoxylin and eosin (H&E) and viewed using brightfield microscopy.
While fluorescence based images provide useful molecular information for confirming and characterizing disease states, conventional histological stained sections remain necessary for pathology determination on tissue. Typically, serial tissue sections through a specimen must be prepared and evaluated. Commonly, the serial sections include a conventional H&E stained section and specially stained section(s) for diagnostic molecular markers. Comparing serial sections not only increases the cost and time necessary for an evaluation, it may be difficult or impossible to correlate features found in one section with features found in the other. Serial sections can be lost or destroyed in the staining process pipeline as well.